Essential Music

Essential Music Publishing is a full-service music publishing company that provides publishing rights management, song licensing, and royalty collection for songwriters and catalog administrators. When we met Essential Music Publishing, one of the most complicated and time consuming parts of their business process was fielding song licensing requests. While this is a major source of revenue for their team, the existing process was time consuming and inefficient - the large majority of the requests they received were missing data, filled with incorrect information and assumptions, and required high-touch customer interaction. Our goal was to automate this cumbersome process, improve customer experience by reducing the opportunity for user error, and differentiate Essential Music Publishing as an industry leader who caters to both commercial and noncommercial users of music.

The Design

The Centresource team took a vision and turned it into a beautiful reality that serves all of our customers, from the users of our new website to the songwriters that create the songs we manage. We can now focus on growing our business because this site has allowed us to do so much more, with less.

Andie RankinsManager of Publishing Administration

The Tech

Drupal

We built the web application in Drupal because of the number of existing music databases the product would interact with. The license checkout process also includes a large number of dependencies based on a customer’s needs, making Drupal the best solution for this client.

Stripe

Payment processing for the product was handled by Stripe, a robust plugin expert in keeping paying customer’s information as secure as possible. Because Stripe handles Personal Credit Information from the server side of applications, we were able to integrate it into the application with ease and maintain the client’s high security standards.

Cohesive UI

We recently redesigned the website of Essential Music Publishing’s sister company, Essential Worship, and Essential Music Publishing wanted their site to complement the design and style of their site. We worked to adapt the look and feel of the Essential Worship site, creating new cohesive elements to fit Essential Music Publishing’s unique needs.

The Results

Our team worked to completely automatize the song license request process, creating an informational stepped licensing request process that both informs users of the most suitable license for their needs and gives them a great “checkout” experience. This improved process reduces the margin for user error and eliminates the bulk of work on the administration side. The product required robust and detailed planning from the project’s strategists and developers, taking into account all possible dependencies and complex object relationships vital to the licensing request project. Our team worked to completely automatize the song license request process, creating an informational stepped licensing request process that both informs users of the most suitable license for their needs and gives them a great “checkout” experience. This improved process reduces the margin for user error and eliminates the bulk of work on the administration side. The product required robust and detailed planning from the project’s strategists and developers, taking into account all possible dependencies and complex object relationships vital to the licensing request project. Heavy collaboration with the client was vital in this engagement, Essential Music Publishing’s active involvement in the product development process ensured that we were building a product that would solve the pain they felt. We were able to relieve the manual workload for Essential Music Publishing, giving them time back in their days to focus on other initiatives as well as create a direct impact on their company’s ROI. The final product set Essential Music Publishing apart in a highly competitive landscape as a company that can serve the needs of both industry and non-industry users.